Intro to Ecology & Evolution

This course was an advancement on BIO 120, primarily involving examination of the central concepts of evolutionary and ecological theory and their application. Principles underlying the interactions of organisms within their environments including the population, community, and ecosystem levels of organization were emphasized.

Throughout this course we did a research project with a purpose of understanding how the Human population compares to the Red Cardinal, Pileated Woodpecker and Yellow-Rumped Warbler populations within Loudoun County, VA. This is important to assess as an ecosystem’s health and integrity are affected by bird biodiversity due to birds playing parts in seed distributions, prey consumption, and food source. The final presentation of this project is linked below.

The Influence of Human Population on Bird Abundances in Loudoun County https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1cYvP8a4EQs0OOkjR8vRt3GFgRTbeDplSITyMvuQKFFA/edit?usp=sharing

This course and project were very helpful in teaching how to find, filter, and utilize public access information such as bird observation data that was collected by individual volunteers, but standardized to be reliable and useful to researchers. It was difficult to work around holes in the data but ended up being a great project in the end.